Five miles downhill from the Berkeley neighborhoods where a fire ordinance is fueling a City Council recall, a Shattuck Avenue gallery has turned the same stripped-bare "Zone 0" into a showroom of things you can buy to fill it.

ACCI Gallery's "Zone 0" exhibition, which opened Saturday in North Berkeley's Gourmet Ghetto, reframes the city's most contested wildfire rule as a design opportunity — noncombustible sculptures, birdbaths and mosaics for the five feet Berkeley now forbids planting in two hillside neighborhoods. It is a cheerful gloss on a mandate that homeowners uphill are fighting with a recall petition and cost estimates running to five figures.

The show, at 1652 Shattuck Ave. through Sept. 27 (external source, opens in a new tab), gathers garden sculpture, fountains, stepping stones, furniture and wall pieces made from metal, glass, ceramics, concrete and tile — materials the gallery bills as noncombustible or fire-resistant. A digital display stands in for works too big to bring indoors.

As reported by SFGATE, curator Ruth Ehrenkrantz said the idea came from a friend who floated a garden-art take on Zone 0, and that an open call drew more strong submissions than the gallery could hang. Her framing for visitors is a question: what belongs in that space "besides gravel" that might "bring you joy" on the way to your own front door. She hopes people leave seeing "positive options" for their own yards.

The joy is doing real political work. "Zone 0" is shorthand for the first five feet around a structure — the strip most likely to catch a wind-blown ember and turn a house into the next house's ignition source. Berkeley didn't wait for Sacramento to regulate it. Under the city's Effective Mitigation for Berkeley's Ember Resistance ordinance, which took effect Jan. 1 (external source, opens in a new tab), nearly all vegetation and combustible material is banned within five feet of homes in the Grizzly Peak and Panoramic Hill mitigation areas — roughly 1,400 properties (external source, opens in a new tab) on the city's eastern edge.

Her framing for visitors is a question: what belongs in that space "besides gravel" that might "bring you joy" on the way to your own front door.

That is where the cheer runs out. Critics filed recall paperwork in February against Councilmember Brent Blackaby, who championed the rules, accusing him of "inadequate stakeholder engagement." Rhonda Gruska, a District 6 resident with the Alliance for Practical Fire Solutions, told Berkeleyside she needed 2,578 signatures to force a recall election and called the threshold "daunting." Her group says the city's estimate of under $4,000 to comply understates a bill that can reach $60,000 on some lots, and that many affected neighbors are retirees on fixed incomes.

The city is not blinking. Fire Chief David Sprague told a May webinar that the state's own newly adopted, more lenient standard would "do little to nothing" to stop homes from igniting, and that following Berkeley's stricter code gives a house a far better chance of surviving. California's Board of Forestry, more than three years past its legislative deadline, finalized rules in mid-August (external source, opens in a new tab) that experts called weaker than the science supports — which Blackaby has cast as "a floor, not a ceiling" that leaves cities free to go further.

Assistant Fire Chief Colin Arnold, who runs Berkeley's wildland-urban interface division, said the department's inspections so far have been at homeowners' request, with mandatory enforcement ramping up. So the exhibition lands at a useful moment for the ordinance's backers: a free, walk-in argument that compliance need not mean a moonscape of pebbles. Whether a $2,000 bronze mobile answers a retiree staring at a $60,000 abatement quote is a different question — one the gallery's wall text does not ask.

The art is genuine, and so is the fire risk that gave it a theme. What the show quietly does is convert a coercive rule into a lifestyle — the most Berkeley possible way to sell a mandate its own hills are trying to overturn.